_{^{(Photo: Yeobie the Squirrel enjoying a burning ice sculpture, an icon of the school's wonderful usage of money during the "Winter Oberland" spectacle.)}}

Oberlin’s new motto should be: “keep the savings, pass on the sacrifices.” This, at least, appears to be the line taken by President Ambar, as evidenced in her recent interview with the New York Times; a rosy portrayal which glosses over the serious hardships taken on by students, staff, and faculty in a dismal year.

Though Oberlin may be able to paint itself as a shining beacon of light in an abyssal year, it does not show in their actual actions. Chief amongst these considerations has been a complete absence of any effort to make school fiscally accessible for the countless students who have been viscerally affected by the results of a year of lockdowns, illnesses, and deaths.

Oberlin has not made any attempt to lower their tuition for current students during the whole of the pandemic. In a year which has seen the worst job losses and employment since the Great Depression, it is almost a surety that the families supporting our students have been affected. This is to say nothing of the students themselves, who are dependent upon employment on campus or elsewhere to afford their tuition (frequently in addition to predatory loans). It is unconscionable that the school has not attempted to alleviate this matter whatsoever.

So obvious was the matter of fiscal accessibility that even in an often politically negligent publication such as the New York Times, President Ambar’s interviewer pressed her as to why no attempt was made by the school to change their tuition rates.

Ambar coldly says in response to this question that one is "investing in is a high-cost model […] [a] full student life experience. […] everybody was on-campus, so that value didn’t change." No further explanation is given.

First, we should remind ourselves that students are not solely driven by the cold calculations of rate of interest on their education. Many, on scholarship or on work grant, cannot choose to skip a year due to the conditions of their funding. Others might face a return to unsafe living circumstances if they choose to forego a year of their education. Many might lack reliable internet or technology at home to make remote learning possible. For many, the choice to return to campus does not reflect the cold economic calculus which Ambar offers – there is no choice at all.

Second, we must remember that in a great many ways, the quality of the education itself has fallen drastically. Even Ambar herself concedes that earlier in the school that "we were altering their college experience in the most profound way that one could possibly alter it." Even though most students have remained "on-campus", they remain so only in the most nominal way: the vast majority of classes are still conducted digitally. Learning outcomes from digital education often fall far short of the standard of in-person education, from the combination of factors including a work/life imbalance, the stress placed on professors to make the transition digitally with little help, and the general malaise from continued quarantine measures. Students may have been able to attend lectures and complete assignments, but were often unable to actually participate in class discussions, socialize with any of their colleagues, or utilize the school’s on campus resources which are a critical component of students’ massive investments as well as their mental-health and general well-being. Hardly the "full student life experience" which Ambar claims has been held up throughout the pandemic.

Conservatory classes have suffered especially. The artistic development, as well as the simple emotional connection that comes with collaboration is all but lost, and conference call technology can’t bring that back. While President Ambar remains hopeful about the development of real-time rooms or other remote collaboration options, the actual use of these softwares is frustrating, fraught with technological errors, and overall, demoralizing for musicians hoping to make a career out of their art.

We realize, of course, that for reasons of health and safety, the school could not have afforded to return fully to the normal model of education. But this makes the whole situation even more insulting. Administrators across the nation knew that a return to campus would result in the infection of students by a potentially life-threatening disease, but continued to open so as to continue taking students’ tuition. To claim that the potentially life-risking activity of an "on campus experience" was taken by students purely only the wish to "buy into an experience" is shockingly out of touch. For many there was no choice of opting-in or opting-out of an "experience" whatsoever due to their circumstances. To offer no extended relief to those who had to continue out of necessity is unconscionable.

The problem of tuition relief, however, raises the larger question for the school throughout the pandemic: who is going to fit the bill for the inevitable economic losses? The students, the staff, the faculty, or perhaps finally – the school?

In a bizarre assertion late in the interview, Ambar claims that “we have the ability to be able to tap our endowment for an emergency.” And yet, despite the most clear and present sign of an emergency in the past century, the endowment remains barely tapped. The school reportedly withdrew $70 million from the endowment this year, almost twice as much as its expected annual withdrawal of $40 million. While this figure looks large, it becomes paltry in the face of the fact that the school earned a fine $63 million between June and November 2020 from gains on the stock market during the pandemic. If this is the best we can do with the endowment for a once-in-a-century natural disaster, what exactly might a real "emergency" look like?

The best Oberlin could do in terms of offering fiscal relief for this year was a temporary period of $10,000 grants to student applicants for Fall 2021. But obviously, but this does not extend to all of the current students who have been deeply affected by the pandemic. Given changes in administration at Oberlin, so far all of which have been aimed at a regime of fiscal austerity, it is all but certain that the college could have done more.

In addition, tapping the endowment could have done more than just alleviated the sufferings of students who have taken up further debt to keep the student afloat - it could’ve also helped those laid off by the union-busting practices of the school during 2020. The cost to have kept the UAW workers on employed or on temporary furlough would have amounted to approximately $2 million a year, according to fiscal reports made by the school itself. A mere fragment of the money the school’s investment funds made during the stock market killings of the past year.

At the end of the day, we know the costs will undoubtedly be passed on to us, and those we hold in solidarity amongst the critical workers of the school. As with the rest of the ironies of the pandemic, we have learned that those truly most "essential" to any institution are viewed as little more than expendable in the end. We must remain vigilant and continue to hold the administration accountable for their negligence during the pandemic.

Editor's Note: A Spanish edition of this article is currently being proofread and will be uploaded to The Spectre in the next few days.

On March 18, 1981, a day like today, the Salvadoran and Honduran armies massacred hundreds of refugees fleeing both civil war and political persecution on the Río Lempa, a river forming the border between Honduras and El Salvador. Both armies had received money, arms, and training from the United States.

Most of the refugees came from the rural communities of Santa Marta and Peña Blanca, both in Cabañas province, El Salvador. The Salvadoran army had completely and forcibly displaced both communities in scorched earth operations intended to suppress social movements, particularly farmworkers’ unions protesting terrible living conditions and poverty wages of about only 0.25 colones per day, equivalent to around $0.03 USD per day in 1980.

Alba Laínez, who was a small child when survived the massacre, explains:

“My Papá and Mamá almost didn't explain, the only thing they said was that we were all leaving together and to stay close to Mamá, not to separate from her, because there were many people. So in March 1981 when there was the Río Lempa massacre, there I was in Río Lempa. We arrived around maybe 7 in the morning and I remember I saw many people by the river but I didn’t know where they were going. I only saw the crowd, I didn’t feel scared then. I remember that [before the massacre when fleeing her family's village in El Salvador] at night we walked and walked and walked and were very tired when we got to the river. I played in the water, and what happened after, I still feel it and what hurts me the most is what happened to my grandfather.
"My grandfather was 87, 88 years old, very elderly, with a walking stick. I remember he sat down next to the stream to play with us. I remember it like it was yesterday - we heard a bomb that had fallen into the river, so we ran, my Mamá took us to hide under a rock and then I remember that my grandfather wasn't there. I didn’t see him again. I’m telling you, he was safer because he could swim, but at his age, maybe he couldn’t, and he remained there. I’ve always said I will go bring flowers to the water for him but I don’t know if I’ll be able to. Nobody in the family saw him again. We crossed the river around 1 in the afternoon and walked towards La Virtud [a refugee camp in Honduras] and I was very scared because I saw planes.”

During the massacre, both the Salvadoran army and the Honduran army shot from their respective sides of the river at refugees attempting to cross the border. Helicopters - the result of US military aid - dropped bombs from above. While refugees set up a rope across the river to give people something to hold onto while crossing even if they couldn’t swim, the Salvadoran army opened a dam upstream of the crossing to cause hundreds of people to drown.

The scorched earth operations resulting in this massacre were part of a widespread political repression in El Salvador and were supported by the United States in order to suppress leftist organizing, including that of both farmworkers' unions and guerrillas in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Alfredo Leiva, current president of the Santa Marta housing cooperative and a disabled veteran of the FMLN, described living conditions in Santa Marta before the war and the situation of surviving refugees after the massacre:

“There was a situation of extreme poverty and difficult living conditions. I survived extreme malnutrition as a result of my family’s conditions. And the actions people undertook had a response by the army and the government - to repress the group of people who had started to organize. So I saw myself involved in this and when the military operations began… in 1979 they burned our house while we weren’t there - we had fled from the political repression, and the military came and burned our house, so we had to hide in the mountain and find shelter from the bad weather outdoors.
"When the March 1981 operation came they expelled everyone. So people went towards Honduras, and I was in Lempa when there was the massacre. I crossed the river at 5 in the morning and the bombing started around 5:30, so my family was already on the other side at that time.
"Later they moved us to La Virtud, where we got set up in a refugee camp, but the conditions were very difficult. There were days when 7 people died every day [...] because they died from, well, diarrheas, that are diseases produced by water contamination in the environment we were living in. Later they [the Honduran military] moved us to Mesa Grande, which was a camp with living conditions a bit better but still difficult. When I was there, at age 14 I became a teacher, because here [in Santa Marta] I had studied up to second grade, so I started teaching there.”

Following the massacre, those who had survived lived in refugee camps in Honduras for years. Many of them returned to El Salvador starting in 1988, but the Salvadoran Civil War continued until the Peace Accords in 1992.

The scorched earth operations of the 1980s were an act of class warfare against people who organized for better living conditions, food, health care, and education at a time when landowners and farm owners did not want to pay anything resembling a living wage.

Both the Carter and Reagan United States presidential administrations sent military aid to the far-right military Salvadoran government, but the military aid from the United States greatly increased under the Reagan administration. In a 1981 press conference, President Reagan claimed that the United States were “helping the forces that are supporting human rights” by sending helicopters, arms, and money.

A 2016 Freedom of Information Act report on internal communications between United States diplomats showed that the diplomats already knew in 1981 that the Salvadoran military had killed hundreds of refugees, but objected to calling the massacre a “massacre” for political reasons.^[1] In light of this, the United States continued sending military aid to the Salvadoran government. The weapons trade and the training military officials from the El Salvador army received on scorched earth and torture techniques at the United States funded School of the Americas (now the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation", or WHINSEC), were important causes of the continuation of this state violence for over a decade. Nine months after the Río Lempa massacre, the Salvadoran army massacred over 800 more people at El Mozote.

On this, the 40th anniversary of the Río Lempa massacre, the Spectre and Oberlin in Solidarity with El Salvador remember and mourn people murdered to protect capitalist exploitation. In the past four decades, we have seen this history repeat slightly differently every time an imperialist commits a war crime, every time governments intentionally cause refugees to drown, and every time capitalists respond to workers' organizing for their rights and improved living conditions by killing people. What kinds of organizing would need to happen for these atrocities to truly stop happening again?
In solidarity with movements for social justice, economic equality, and real human rights everywhere, we send condolences to the families and communities of people murdered on this day in 1981.

Writer/director Wes Craven is undoubtedly a horror legend, having created such iconic franchises as Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream along with lesser-known but still beloved films such as The Hills Have Eyes. However, one of his best and most unique films is all but forgotten today: The People Under the Stairs.

The People Under the Stairs is a weird movie. If you have, for whatever reason, ever wanted to see Big Ed from Twin Peaks dressed in a gimp suit and repeatedly firing a shotgun into the walls of his house to try and kill a cackling, tongueless trickster-child that lives within them, you’re in luck. But the truly brilliant thing about The People Under the Stairs is that it’s also unabashedly a leftist manifesto; a scathing exposé of the inherent violence and racism of capitalist social structures, criticizing both the material factors of urban capitalism and the ideological factors of the white nuclear family.

The setup is simple and does the near-impossible job of making the film’s Home Alone-meets-Get Out premise work: Fool is an African-American kid living in the ghetto, part of the last family remaining in an otherwise empty apartment building. His mother has cancer and can’t afford chemotherapy, and his family needs to pay their rent within the next twenty-four hours or else they’ll be charged an exorbitant late fee and then summarily evicted, leaving the building open for demolition and eventual gentrification. Fool ends up becoming part of a scheme to break into his landlords’ house to steal the hoard of gold coins they supposedly keep in their basement.

Right from the beginning, Fool questions the unfairness of his family’s situation: why do these people get to control whether he has a home? Why are they allowed to use brutal economic violence to kick Fool and his family out? Why do the landlords even need Fool’s money, if they already (supposedly) have more money than they can ever spend? While the adults in Fool’s story are pragmatic and jaded, Fool’s perspective as a kid is so important because he has not yet “grown up” and become accustomed to the everyday violence of capitalism. He interrogates the structures that bind him, causing those around him to question their own places in their society.

Once inside his landlords’ house, Fool finds himself caught in a twisted maze of traps and hidden passages, chased by “Mommy” and “Daddy” Robeson, his landlords and film’s villains (played to perfection by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie of Twin Peaks). Mommy and Daddy are a pitch-perfect parody of ’80s white suburban domesticity: aside from being clear caricatures of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, the pair are an incestuous couple who live in absurd luxury that nonetheless seems to be decaying around them. They bicker and scream at each other constantly, and their primary hobby appears to be kidnapping poor white children from the slums to raise as their own. Any children who transgress their house rules, however, are mutilated and locked in a cage under the basement stairs, where they are regularly abused and fed only human flesh.

These people under the stairs, aside from giving the film its title, also serve to cement its clearest metaphor: Wes Craven, in the film’s supplementary material, has said that the Robesons’ house represents “the whole society of the United States”. The racial Other is kept as far away from the center of power as possible, used for profit until they’re exhausted of all utility. The white lower class, on the other hand, is granted conditional entry into the halls of power. They hold no real influence, of course, and if they step out of line, they are cast out. Whereas those upstairs profit in a neatly detached way from the suffering of those below them, managing the ghetto anonymously and from a safe distance, those in the basement are conditioned to feed on human flesh, needing to confront the suffering that keeps their society going and to either willingly engage in perpetuating it or starve.

The film is, however, not all doom and gloom. Fool escapes the Robesons’ house, leaving behind both the fabled hoard of coins and his new friend and ally in the Robesons’ “daughter”, the sole remaining child who has not yet been condemned to the basement. Then, unusually for a horror film, Fool willingly comes back, not content to let his friend and his community down. The police, of course, are no help whatsoever: they’re easily charmed by the Robesons’ illusions of civility. Fool knows he must take direct action, and that he does: he frees his friend, finds the money, and leads his community in a revolution against the Robesons. Mommy and Daddy Robeson are torn apart and eaten by the people under the stairs, and the manor, with all its dusty antiques and secret passages and piles of rotting money, explodes, raining its treasures down upon the people of the ghetto. The film’s ultimate message is one of hope, of salvation for those victimized by capitalism and of redemption for those who unwillingly take part in it.

Just before his death in 2015, Wes Craven announced that he was remaking The People Under the Stairs (seemingly with a more supernatural tone) for television. Although his work was never completed, while this article was being written, it was announced that Jordan Peele would be producing a remake of the film. The story certainly deserves to get another shot, as well as a retelling from one of the modern horror masters in a more contemporary context, but the general consensus online seems to be that the original was a flawed but interesting film, something with a lot to say that it wasn’t necessarily good at saying. Honestly, I think this perception is wrong: not only are its themes as relevant as ever, it’s also a damn good film. Although its mix of black humor, horror, and social commentary might not work for everyone, there’s a good chance it’ll work for you. At the very least, you’ll have a point of comparison for when Jordan Peele’s version comes out in a couple of years.

In late March, 31-year-old father of three and Amazon worker Christian Smalls was on his lunch break when he decided to organize a strike with 50 of his colleagues.

He was working the floor of a Staten Island Amazon fulfillment center, alongside 5,000 others, and he felt that all of their lives were in danger. He noticed that his coworkers were becoming sick and that the company was not effectively sanitizing their equipment. When Barbara Chandler, his colleague at the site, was confirmed positive for COVID-19, she was told by Human Resources to keep it on the “down low.” Yet ignoring health issues has never been exceptional for Amazon management. In the 855,000 sq. ft facility, workers work ten hours a day at a constant, fast pace to fulfill their daily quotas, lest their performance evaluations sink, which they readily do. Time spent using restrooms is considered “time off task.” At Mr. Smalls’ Staten Island facility, 66% of 145 surveyed employees reported experiencing physical pain while performing their job duties. Frustrated by management’s apathy amidst a global pandemic, he took his anger to task.

With 50 of his colleagues, Mr. Smalls called on Amazon management to close its facility for thorough cleaning and demanded hazard pay, more rigorous safety protocols, and greater transparency. Two hours later, he received a phone call from upper management. He was fired.

The grounds of his termination were made clear when Vice News leaked internal notes from an Amazon executive meeting, at which CEO Jeff Bezos was present. It is illegal to fire an employee in New York for striking. Their solution? Indict him for endangering other workers by not following a paid quarantine order that only he received. Deflect an oncoming wave of bad press; smear him as “not smart, or articulate.” Finally, “[lay] out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail — if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” During this meeting, General Counsel David Zapolsky made the case for a total character assassination of Mr. Smalls to a room of executives.

Megacorporations like Amazon have a market incentive to convince us that the pandemic is affecting everyone equally. By branding work as a kind of selfless grind, public intervention is avoided, and profits continue their undisrupted flow from the bottom-up. Behind an Amazon executive honoring their “retail heroes” on Twitter, there is a workforce of millions held hostage by their company under the threat of unemployment, homelessness, and death. Billionaires and CEOs like Elon Musk offer concessionary PR gifts to the commons, like bunk ventilators, and are lauded for their charity. In exchange for the bare minimum, they are given free press and relative immunity from scrutiny in the mainstream media. Companies are indulging in profitable PR campaigns honoring their employees for their selfless work while providing little to no advances in hazard pay, personal protective equipment, or sick leave. The glass spheres towering over Amazon’s Seattle campus recently glowed a sterile blue to honor frontline workers. Meanwhile, for people who are immunocompromised or live in food deserts, online ordering becomes a necessary measure to avoid risking a trip to the supermarket — they likely rely on delivery services like Amazon or Instacart for food. For those who are homeless, or for those who are currently incarcerated, the chances of catching coronavirus are extraordinarily high, and the quality of healthcare if infected remains abysmally low. Our low-wage workers have spontaneously been promoted to “essential workers,” but are dispensable once they ask to be compensated fairly. Despite the veil of charity and service that corporations continue to advertise, workers bear the brunt of relentless exploitation even if they are most susceptible to illness or death. The stakes of extreme class inequality have never been greater than within a global pandemic. While there is a momentous public health case for sweeping labor reform and social safety nets, our advanced capitalist democracy’s response could only ever have been incremental change or none at all.

But with so many reasons to fall into despair, workers are now striking in droves. On March 31, Whole Foods employees organized a nationwide “sick-out” to demand doubled hazard pay from Amazon. Gig workers who work for companies like Uber and Instacart, many of whom are independently contracted, are refusing to work in response to inadequate hazard pay and support for at-risk individuals. They are organized by a non-union nonprofit entity known as the Gig Workers Collective, a newly formed group of self-described “first responders.” Fast food workers across 50 restaurants in California organized a walk-off strike on April 9 to demand more personal protective equipment (PPE), increased hazard pay, and paid sick leave. Amid mass layoffs, many General Electric factory workers are demanding their sites be transformed into ventilator manufacturing plants — to huge success. Even nurses, frustrated with constant shortages of ventilators, N95 masks, and other PPE, have organized a nationwide strike on April 15th. Across the country, unions are fighting to their last breath to protect our workers.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the US’ largest federation of unions, recently published a list of priorities addressed to the federal government regarding the novel labor issues caused by coronavirus. The list includes many rapid-response measures to directly protect workers during the pandemic. These include subsidizing payrolls for struggling sectors such as the airline industry, instituting new worker safety standards, and guaranteeing 14 days of paid sick leave to all workers.

Facing mass layoffs, many of our nation’s 40 million renters find themselves unable to pay rent. Amidst a lack of state protections, they, too, are organizing. In the period from April 1st through April 5th, the National Multifamily Housing Council reported about a third of 13.4 million surveyed renters did not pay rent. Many tenants across the country are advocating for city and statewide rent freezes. The Philadelphia Tenant Union recently moved to advocate for a city-wide rent strike for the duration of the crisis. New York tenant coalition Housing For All is also advocating for city-wide rent and mortgage payment freezes. Many individual tenants are even making use of their time spent quarantined to organize with their neighbors to pressure their landlords to freeze rent payments. The National Consumer Law Center has since reported that more than a dozen states have moved to temporarily halt evictions.

While these workers and tenants are organizing and striking, companies are now becoming less and less willing to risk the bad optics of terminating protesters. The pandemic has revived in many organizers a sense of urgency to demand better rights for workers.

What we are seeing is the extent to which the material inequalities produced by capitalism can exacerbate the deadly repercussions of natural crises like pandemics. When a worker is exposed to COVID-19 in the workplace yet is forced to continue working, it travels to their family, their community, and beyond. Suddenly, a sick worker is no longer just a financial liability — he is a public health risk. When the safety of a worker becomes the concern of the public, a strong case is made for more safe working environments, better wages, and a national healthcare system that doesn’t rely on employers. Not only this, but the extent to which corporations are not doing enough is making workers like Christian Smalls realize just how little their livelihoods matter to these companies.

As the repercussions of COVID-19 ravaged nearly every sector of the market, our world’s richest struck really, really lucky. When jobless claims soared to 6.6 million in the week ending March 28, Bezos reaped the profits of the best 3-day stock market period since 1933. He sold $3.4 billion in shares in the first week of February, just before the coronavirus pandemic hit the US in full swing. On March 26 alone, he saw his fortunes rise by $3.9 billion. The average annual salary for an Amazon warehouse employee is about $31,000.

There is simply no modern precedent to the situation our world is currently facing. A whopping 22 million figure for jobless claims in the week ending April 11th is only comparable to rates seen during the Great Depression. Even during the 2008 financial recession, jobless claims had only peaked on March 28, 2009, at 655,000: only 3% of our current figure. Our country is currently permeated with unemployment, and it’s leaving people disillusioned, alienated, and in shock. One effect of the massive rise in unemployment is the recent movement of people protesting against stay-at-home orders, dubbed “Operation Gridlock.” Across the country, conservative demonstrators have gathered to demand from their politicians the right to return to work. Gridlock’s constituents, too, are grappling with the shock to a system that we have all, to some extent, gotten used to. For our workers who cannot quarantine at home, or for our people without homes, or for our sick without the ability to go to the hospital, the actions that our Left must take now will help shape how our most vulnerable will make it out of this pandemic.

Significantly, many of these workers who are now striking are non-union. Over the years it has become increasingly hard for workers to unionize. The National Labor Relations Board under the Trump administration recently rolled back many hard-fought advances for unions. Union membership has fallen from 23.6% in 1980 to just 10.7% in 2017 and continues to diminish by each passing year. The scope of American union bargaining power is dwindling. We must be prepared to reconcile with a reality where wildcat strikes and non-union structures become new primary actors in affecting labor reform.

This may all seem like ample reason for despair, but our country has a hidden history of homegrown wildcat strikes. Recall that the main catalyst that unionized the U.S. postal service was a massive wildcat strike organized by rank and file workers in 1970, under the Nixon administration. Before the strike, postal union lobbying had yielded no gains, and collective bargaining was not lawfully permitted to US postal workers. Workers reported poor, unsafe working conditions, and low wages. When workers across the country organized an eight-day strike in March of 1970, Nixon declared a national emergency and called upon US armed forces and the National Guard to break the strike and distribute mail. It was the largest wildcat strike in US history. It crippled the national mail system, depreciated the stock market, and brought the Nixon administration to its knees. Soon after, Nixon dissolved the U.S. Post Office Department and created the new U.S. Postal Service, which included for all workers the right to negotiate on wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Now, at a time when the imposition of extreme austerity measures remains a significant possibility, we should not rely on only our victimhood to propel us into action. We should challenge ourselves to create, if not build upon, lasting collective bargaining structures that will withstand until after the end of this crisis. Our current dire circumstances are enabling workers to demand changes that reflect the seriousness of the pandemic, like masks for workers, rent freezes, and paid sick leave. However, it remains to be seen whether or not this moment of collective bargaining will be able to sustain after the virus is contained.

The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that the system we currently live in is under no obligation to make any sense to you. It will also be demonstrated that the state will readily spend as much as it needs to keep our most wealthy afloat. Many are speculating that the conditions of this pandemic will spur a new labor movement on an unprecedented scale. In the deeply uncertain world that exists after the pandemic, a re-energized labor movement in America must keep fighting and toughen up for what’s to come.

On February 18^th, the school announced its executive decision to fire 108 workers from UAW Local 2192, consisting of almost 70% of the UAW membership spread across various positions. While this announcement may make it appear that the Oberlin administration is stepping out of the shadows and making its changes transparent, it only continues the administration’s obfuscation of its unrelenting exploitation of labor.

Across the process of the AAPR, now conveniently rebranded as “One Oberlin”(united, apparently, only in debt) — we are constantly told of the “shared sacrifices” of cost-cutting. But who is truly to share in these sacrifices? Apparently top on the list of sacrificial lambs is some 108 workers and their families, dependents, and communities, some of whom having been dedicated to the college for over forty years. Even as some administrators continue to take home six figure salaries.

The Oberlin administration, in fact, has little moral regard for its actions. By all indications, the blatant union busting which has taken place has been done so blatantly precisely because the school expects there to be little memory of it. With an endlessly shifting media landscape, and a turnover of students every four years, they expect there to be little if any ability for people to bring lasting institutional memory to hold the school accountable for its actions. With this mindset, the administration might regard the recent protests as the peak of a passing inconvenience, amounting to little more than a brief flashpoint which will quickly burn out, ultimately leaving the institution unscarred.

Therefore, the task that lies ahead for all concerned parties is the arduous one of making sure that the school’s actions will be remembered and that those responsible for them are held accountable. Make no mistake, this may be one of the college’s last opportunities for significant activist work. It is far harder for students to work to re-establish a union than it is for the college to break one, and by all signs the school will be working harder and harder to depoliticize the student body every year.

It is crucial for anyone who is disgusted by the college’s actions, anyone who is concerned for the college’s future, and anyone who has even a shred of respect for Oberlin’s broader community to join in resistance against the college’s actions. There may not be another time.

On Tuesday, February 18th, Oberlin College notified staff, students, and alumni of its intent to lay off 108 full-time unionized employees in custodial and dining services. In the College’s email sent to students, it intimated plans to bring in third-party management contractors to staff these positions, allowing the College to free up money in its budget. This announcement threatens 70% of Oberlin’s UAW (United Auto Workers) staff with unexpected job insecurity and financial uncertainty. While suggesting that Oberlin will encourage new management to privilege hiring current employees, this outcome means that workers staying in Oberlin would take a dramatic pay cut and lose their hard-fought benefits.

Following this announcement, students organized multiple demonstrations of solidarity with workers facing layoffs for the next day, culminating in an 850 student protest outside of the General Faculty Council’s scheduled 12:00 meeting. Chanting “union-busting is disgusting” and “workers are our families,” about one third of the Oberlin student body lined the halls of the third floor of King. Once at capacity, students also filled the first floor, spilling over into parts of the second. The demonstration made clear that Oberlin’s student community stands opposed to the College’s announcement and in support of UAW.

Additionally, organizers demanded that worker and student voices be given access to the GenFac meeting ongoing in King 306. During the meeting, Student Senator Renzo Mayhall requested that GenFac grant time to union representatives and students — with zero votes against this request, GenFac approved allowed elected UAW Local 2192 representatives Erik Villar and Buffy Lukachko and student organizer Elsa Schlensker to speak in forceful opposition of the College’s announcement. According to Student Senator Caitlin Kelley, most of GenFac affirmed the motion to let Villar, Lukachko, and Schlensker speak, though several voting parties, including Pres. Ambar, were reported to abstain.

Erik Villar, the Oberlin chairperson for UAW Local 2192, was the first Oberlin worker to hear about the layoff threat. On Tuesday, Villar was asked to meet with management at 11:30 AM, only fifteen minutes prior to this time. Three hours later, rank and file members were invited to a meeting hastily scheduled for 2:30 PM. Minutes after this meeting began, students received an email in their inboxes with the subject line “Dining and Custodial Negotiations.”

Students planned an immediate response, initially meeting to formulate a plan of action at 4:30 PM on Tuesday. Students affiliated with SLAC (Student Labor Action Coalition), Oberlin Beyond Austerity, and OYDSA were joined by dozens of other concerned students, who had gotten wind of the meeting by word of mouth. Student activists learned that administrators would be officially informing UAW night shift workers the following day at a 7:30 AM meeting, and the College’s General Faculty Council at 12:00 PM, and SLAC, OBA, and OYDSA put out calls to students to attend these meetings in support of labor. General Faculty meetings are attended by GenFac Council, Student Senate, and College senior administrators.

Later that night, over 100 students crammed into Wilder 115, joined by several workers affected by the College’s decision and UAW’s representatives. Angry, hurt, and scared, UAW workers expressed concerns about their families, their livelihoods, and their community, as well as shock at the callous attitude the College displayed toward members of its community, some of whom have committed decades of service to the College.

Workers warned students that non-union positions would pay sub-living wages, provide staff with scant benefits, and be afflicted by high turnover. This move would compromise the working conditions and livelihoods of Oberlin’s labor force, and this sudden announcement has rendered the job stability of dozens of families suddenly precarious. They also warned that a mass exodus of these jobs would have far reaching consequences for the greater Oberlin community, asserting that their work, charity, and general participation in the community would be sorely missed.

Students then began making signs and banners, writing press releases, posting to social media, and contacting the press in advance of the demonstration outside of GenFac. Everyone was encouraged to wear red the next day.

The next morning, Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo addressed a full room on the second floor of Knowlton gym at 7:30 AM, packed with UAW members and over 60 students attending in support, largely clad in red. This meeting was originally intended to inform the staff who had not been able to attend the meeting the day before about the layoffs. But there was no surprise when the announcement was made; everyone already knew.

UAW members and representatives took this opportunity to voice their dismay. “We don’t feel, as a body of, workers that we’re respected for every day we come in. We are losing our jobs — there’s so much disrespect,” said one individual. On the verge of tears, another said “if I lose my job, I’m on the street — I’ve been here 22 years, and now I wake up today and find out I’m out of a job?”

Workers also raised concerns about third-party management contractors’ lack of vetting applied to temporary workers. One worker alluded to multiple concerns over sexual misconduct, including an incident of sexual assault over the summer involving a temporary employee (The Spectre has not been able to verify this claim at this time).

Then, beginning around 11:35 AM, student demonstrators largely wearing red began pouring into the King building. They were directed to crowd marshals in the first-floor lobby, who gave demonstrators signs and directed them where to go. Sporting a banner reading “It’s not One Oberlin minus 108,” the student demonstrators showed meeting attendees, and members of the local press, that students stand together against union-busting, and reject the divisive implications of the “One Oberlin” report.

Despite their numbers, students refrained from blocking the meeting room or passage through the hallway and adhered to building fire codes. Students remained in the building until around 12:20. When organizers announced that their immediate demand — speaking time during the GenFac meeting — had been met, demonstrators dispersed for lunch. The majority then returned to King’s halls by 1:00 PM in order to be seen by meeting attendees on their way out. Most of the attendees, including President Ambar and College deans, left using an alternative exit in the building’s south stairwell, avoiding demonstrators.

Since Oberlin’s Academic & Administrative Program Review (AAPR) began issuing reports, culminating in May’s “One Oberlin” report, student labor activists have warned that Oberlin’s hourly workers would bear the brunt of upcoming budget cuts. Tuesday’s announcement represents a change in tactics, from the College’s “death by a thousand tiny cuts” incremental strategy (see: “Divide and Conquer”), to openly acknowledging that union labor is on the chopping block.

This threat has, so far, galvanized wide support for hourly staff on the part of the entire Oberlin community. An online letter titled “Oberlin Alumni Say No to Union Busting,” received over 1,000 signatures by Thursday evening, hardly 24 hours after it began circulating. In addition, SLAC, OBA, and OYDSA are organizing coordinated campaigns in solidarity with UAW. The Spectre will continue to report on UAW negotiations, student solidarity, and the future of the “One Oberlin” austerity program.

Chances are — whether you read this issue cover to cover, or just happened to glance at the back of it — you’re upset that Oberlin is laying off 108 UAW workers. And, if this is the case, then you’re probably also wondering what we, as individuals, can actually do to stop this. It’s very easy to fall into a hopeless nihilism when fighting the good fight. By reminding ourselves of what we can do, and why we do it, we remind ourselves of our very humanity.

1. Be Angry. Stay Angry.

This movement was sparked by outrage, and outrage will sustain it. We need our convictions to keep us going when the going gets tough. If you find your anger fading, just remember: real people’s livelihoods and humanities are at stake.

2. Get involved!

On Sunday, February 23rd in Dye Lecture Hall, over 150 students came together to turn our spontaneous movement into a coordinated campaign. Members of this assembly formed working groups focused on different areas of organizing that need to happen. If you’re interested in joining and were NOT able to attend the meeting, message Oberlin Beyond Austerity on Facebook. If you’re interested in joining the OYDSA, email us at OberlinYDSA@gmail.com.

3. Demonstrate

When protests do arise, show up, make your voice heard. And though it might feel redundant, inform all you keep in contact with of these protests as you learn of them. There were tentative plans to post upcoming solidarity actions on the bulletin board in first-floor Mudd, so keep an eye out.

4. Educate

Learn what this is really all about. Even simply researching what demonstrations have happened so far, what their goals were, and where students plan on taking action next, is a great start. Once you know the basics, educate your parents, alumni you might know, your friends, anyone who will listen; it is vitally important for these workers that we raise awareness and dissent among the community.

5. Practice self care

I know it’s cheesy, but self care is necessary! Drink water, get enough sleep, eat healthy, and pay attention to your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll have more energy to organize, participate, and contribute if you stay happy and healthy. Take care of your flesh prison, and it will take care of you.

If the College plays hardball, busting Oberlin’s UAW, then this will be a long battle. Let’s not lose sight of why we’re fighting — Oberlin’s hourly staff make a fraction of what Oberlin’s administrators make, and they should not be made to pay for admin’s financial mismanagement with their homes and livelihoods. We abhor the College’s war on organized labor, and we will resist the proposed layoffs.

An anonymous campus worker’s dog, Sasha Barkman, sniffs my hand as her owner tells me about Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, the 20^th-century anarchist writer she’s named after. The dog is, of course, a very good girl. But unfortunately, she’s not the reason we're speaking. A less pleasant matter is at hand: the Oberlin administration has threatened to lay off 108 custodial and dining workers.

This campus worker has worked at Oberlin full-time for a little over two years. Before that, he wandered the Ohio restaurant scene, working long weeks with low pay, regularly dealing with failed businesses and bounced paychecks. Eventually, he ended up with a fairly stable job at a state restaurant, but Oberlin was too good an offer to pass up. Forebodingly, he was brought on as a full-time chef at Dascomb two weeks before it was announced the dining hall would close (see: “Divide and Conquer”).

This worker is only in his mid-30s, but he’s already aged out of restaurant jobs; he can’t compete with 20 year-olds working the entire day in a hot kitchen. He considers himself lucky, too, as he’s on the younger side of the employees whose jobs are being threatened. If worse comes to worst, he doesn’t have a family keeping him here, unlike many of the other workers; it’s just him and Sasha.

Buffy Lukachko has been at Oberlin for ten years; she worked as a custodian for seven, then was promoted to head truck driver. Now, she’s responsible for helping to save over one hundred jobs.

Before Oberlin, Buffy worked as a bus driver in Lorain, moonlighting as a custodian on the side to make ends meet. However, public education funding was going down, and she worried that she’d get caught in layoffs; so, for security’s sake, she applied for another job, one she had seen in the paper: the Oberlin custodial department.

The pay was the same as her last job, so for Buffy, security was the main incentive for the switch. “I knew there had never been layoffs here,” she says. I snort. After seven years working in the custodial department, during which management was so off the ball she would at times have to buy her own cleaning supplies to ensure the dorms were ready for students, she became the head campus truck driver, a position that builds on her previous bus driver experience and has hours that are better for her family. “That kind of upward mobility was possible entirely because of UAW.” She explains that part of the union’s contract is that open positions go out to Oberlin workers before being listed publicly; the union doesn’t just help with benefits, it helps workers build a career here.

Now, she’s the UAW bargaining representative for the custodial staff, on the front lines of the layoff battle. “I think that the #TheyAreOberlinToo campaign is probably the most important thing,” she says. “Throughout AAPR we have been left out and felt othered. We have lost dignity in this whole situation because we’ve been made to feel alienated. We feel that the students here are our family, our responsibility, and we are devastated that the college would treat us as expendable and not important to the process of learning.”

Jake Reed is sitting at a table when I arrive at Stevenson, taking his dinner break with six other CDS workers. “Would you like to talk with all of us?” he asks. Of course I did.

Dave and David are older: Dave is 54, and was planning to stay here until retirement. David is angry that their layoffs are happening just one day before their paid vacation reups; he’s been saving up those vacation days excitedly, while the management accumulates “huge bonuses that I’ll never see in my lifetime.” Dave expresses shock — which the group echoes — that the college administration would go against the school’s stated values so blatantly.

These values, it seems, were a massive draw for everyone at the table when applying here. This is especially true for Kelsey, who says “This college matches my beliefs to a T.” Kelsey and Angel are the two younger guys here. Both were hired this past August, leaving behind managerial restaurant jobs and taking a 15% pay cut in exchange for more free time and a secure future for their family. Angel worked at Outback Steakhouse for nine years, but once his daughter turned 1, he knew he needed a different job. He heard about Oberlin from a friend, and when he looked into the job, he almost couldn’t believe how good it sounded. He had planned on spending the rest of his work life here. “I’ve always heard nothing but great things about the college,” he says. “Hopefully what we’re seeing now, what we’re going through now, hopefully this isn’t the direction the college wants to go.”

Kelsey, too, has a 15-month old daughter, and came here to secure healthcare and funding for a college education for her, benefits he wouldn’t get in the restaurant industry if these layoffs do go through. What gives him hope, however, is the student reaction to the news. “It’s been amazing. That’s the one thing that just kinda blew my mind.”

Lastly, I meet with a campus worker who wishes to remain anonymous, talking to them about the potential impact of the layoffs. “I’m a Democratic Socialist, too,” they tell me. They talk about the impact of layoffs on now-gutted Ohio towns, and the potentially fatal mental health side-effects. They praise Sanders’ Medicare for All, while slamming Buttigieg’s ignorant comments on union healthcare plans. The most interesting thing they tell me about, though, is a conversation they had with Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings amid the flurry of new hires last year. Why, they asked Vazquez-Skillings, was the college doing this among hints from the administration about coming layoffs and cutbacks? Why were they bringing on people like the ones I had talked to at dinner, who had left higher-paying jobs in favor of the stability and benefits of a job at Oberlin, for the sake of their families?

Vazquez-Skillings, they recall, simply responded, “Well, we have to keep the operation running.”

A moral imperative. A thing you have to do because it’s right.

Employers don’t always do things because they’re right, but always do things because they make money. When an employer cuts wages, it’s because they’ll have more money to reduce their debts or line their pockets — the profit motive. Every defense of capitalism has to claim that the profit motive is a moral imperative — what’s good for employers must, by proxy, be good for society. It’s not hard to see cases where this is demonstrably untrue: for example, low wages, while good for employers, keep the majority of workers below a livable allowance.

Oberlin College is, unlike most employers, a non-profit organization. They do not generate profits for shareholders — rather, OC has just shy of a billion dollars in their endowment fund. Strictly speaking, nobody individually reaps the financial revenue that Oberlin generates in order to operate. The six-figure salaries of deans and administrators, while worthy of scrutiny, are not related to how much revenue the College brings in at any given time.

Yet, Oberlin College is acting like a for-profit business. In treating its largely unionized labor force, and other integral parts of the College, as financial liabilities, it is applying the same logic as private-industry profiteers — forcing dramatic cuts and recklessly destabilizing workers’ lives is necessary, in order to keep the College’s finances sustainable.

When the College, or any employer, retains its custodial and dining staff for labor, it asks them to essentially rent their bodies to its money-making enterprise for an hourly fee, a compensatory wage. Working people’s bodies can only work so much, take so much strain, stand on their feet so long — if employers seek labor, they must provide sufficient compensation for this work. At minimum, sufficient compensation is enough to live a financially sustainable life. This is the moral imperative upon employers.

Further, staff must be empowered to place a price on their labor that makes their participation, their expenditure of energy, time, and highly valuable work. This price must include health-care benefits, paid time off, vacation time, and a living wage — in Ohio, a living wage is over $45,000 a year, or at least $22 an hour for full-time employees.

UAW Local 2192 represents the only meaningful bulwark against the College’s desire to transform its labor pool into one comprised of underpaid, non-unionized, and embattled workers. While students have demonstrated their ability and desire to organize in solidarity, our ability to influence decision-making remains to be seen. It’s on us to support the UAW as they face this deplorable existential threat and continue to safeguard the power for Oberlin labor to bargain for workers’ collective benefit.

The moral imperative for any employer, within our capitalist society, is to provide its labor force with just compensation for their labor. A sub-living wage, such as the wages that non-union staff make at Oberlin, is not just an insulting undervaluation of so-called “unskilled labor,” but a moral wrong. It must be corrected — Oberlin should not only immediately walk back its union-busting layoff threats, but also secure a living wage for every one of its hourly employees, union or not.

On the surface, the “One Oberlin” plan to replace 108 UAW members with cheap labor seems straightforward and rational. As the administration has communicated many times, Oberlin is in a deep financial crisis and needs to make cuts to save the institution. Therefore, wouldn’t it be sensible to make cuts to what makes up the majority of the budget — personnel? Shouldn’t all parties make some sacrifices?

If workers and managers were equal in power, we could talk about sacrifices. Clearly, that is not the case. When we take a clear look at the power dynamic at work in Oberlin, we see that this threat of layoffs is a power move, not merely a matter of crunching numbers. The administration does not just want to pay workers less, but views the UAW as a barrier to its administrative schemes. In the College’s short-sighted vision, organized labor is a mere inconvenience.

Of course, Oberlin is currently in difficult financial straits. But we have to ask ourselves, what is the “Oberlin” worth saving? There are only two real choices forward. One is austerity, meaning the acceleration of administrative power, the destruction of unions and collective decision making, and the transformation of Oberlin into a soulless career training center. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein highlights how administrators tactically capitalize on moments of crisis and austerity programs, using these moments to impose unpopular marketization policies that erode democratic decision making.

Oberlin has attempted to destroy the UAW since the 1990s. With the current financial crisis, the Oberlin administration is enacting a state of emergency in which they consolidate their power. Despite the fact that administration got us here in the first place, labor pays the price. Why don’t we focus our scrutiny on our administration, whose misguided decisions have made Oberlin’s finances unsustainable, not the working people who sustain it?

Post-AAPR, Oberlin’s administration has limited its horizon to “fiscal management.” They have used the rhetoric of “One Oberlin” to protect one particular Oberlin — that of administrators. The truth is, there is no “One Oberlin”: the interests of the workers and the administration are diametrically opposed. One stands for exploitation and top-down control, the other stands for the dignity of labor and an egalitarian community. The rhetoric of unity only obscures the conflict between the administration and its labor force.

Instead, let’s expand our horizons and reimagine what “Oberlin” is. In her email announcement and her comments at the General Faculty Meeting, Ambar admitted that Oberlin’s academic mission and the “long-term health of the institution” matter more than its commitment to social justice. Ambar is right that Oberlin College is at an important juncture.

The right path forward for Oberlin excludes College presidents, vice presidents, deans, and, most importantly, Trustees. Oberlin’s transformation should center the people who make this institution work: its employees, and expand their power over their working conditions. At this important moment, Oberlin could transition away from market-oriented management to a democratically run and democratically minded institution. Oberlin should rededicate itself toward advancing social justice, not market competitiveness nor academic prestige — a move that would shore up its institutional integrity instead of jeopardizing it.

The U.S. healthcare system has made the pharmaceutical and insurance industries obscenely wealthy — at everybody else’s expense. A recent Yale study concluded that a universal, single-payer insurance system would save $450 billion and 68,000 lives every year. More than half of Americans support the policy and want to eliminate the private insurance industry, and Bernie Sanders has made it a key policy position. There is a very real possibility that in four years, the U.S. will have a universal public health care system.

Oberlin College leadership and the Board of Trustees have taken a different approach. After decades of mismanagement and rising costs of operation and staffing — in no small part due to the rapidly inflating cost of healthcare — the AAPR final report recommended cutting Oberlin’s budget by an annual $6.2 million. We are beginning to see how administration will be implementing those recommendations.

Displacing unionized workers is not simply about cutting wages, it is also about getting rid of healthcare benefits. The College spends over $5 million a year to pay for the healthcare of its hourly staff. President Ambar has said that the recently threatened layoffs would save up to $2 million; it is likely that this is only the beginning of cuts for employees and students.

Oberlin spends a total of $12.7 million a year on health insurance for current and former employees. If the U.S. had Medicare for All, Oberlin College would pay $0, saving $12.7 million a year. This would positively eliminate the current deficit, freeing millions to the things that make Oberlin what it is: academic programs, financial aid, CDS, OSCA, and the living and working conditions of every hourly worker.

Medicare for All would not only save workers’ jobs, but give them liberties that they have been denied for decades. The American health insurance system keeps workers tethered to their jobs, slows wage growth, and limits the bargaining power of unions. Just this year, General Motors cut health benefits to striking UAW members, threatening their health and safety in order to break the strike. Medicare for All would give workers across this country the power to strike without fear of losing their health insurance, and would let them fight for better wages without sacrificing benefits.

Both the College and the country face an uncertain future — we must rise to this challenge by strengthening society, not weakening it. The U.S. healthcare system must be made to serve working people, not billionaire CEOs and shareholders. Likewise, Oberlin College must serve its communities of students and workers who make it unique, not make secretive accounting decisions that upend the lives of its employees.

After AAPR began rolling out reports last spring, a new group formed to challenge the fundamental logic behind these reports: the logic of austerity. Oberlin Beyond Austerity began organizing to show parallels between AAPR and the history of neoliberalism, the period of capitalism when Ronald Reagan in the U.S., and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., began cutting government spending and ushering in periods of social decline.

Reagan and Thatcher’s governments, in response to what they have perceived as state overspending, implemented cuts to social services and welfare, and privatized government initiatives. More recently, austerity measures have been seen in Europe following the ‘07-‘08 fiscal crisis. The atmosphere of spending cuts and privatization create an “austere” environment. Like AAPR, these administrations were obsessed with their financial “bottom line” and infatuated with the quick fix that austerity programs provided.

This College is following the austerity “playbook” as they make cuts to services across the board. No matter that it may upend the livelihoods of 108 unionized custodial and dining staff in the process — using subcontracted labor, instead of union labor, is an obvious path to easing the College’s financial burden. This disingenuous appeal to “necessity” characterizes all austerity regimes. But is it truly so necessary? Is there really no alternative?

Austerity often does have short term benefits. It is by all means intuitive that if one spends less money, one is going to have more money on hand. The problem, however, is that the long term damages far outweigh the short term benefits. Governments which have employed austerity measures tend to see diminishing government debt and decreasing inflation — the desired results. But these come at the cost of public services and investment in vital economic spending; as a consequence, workers’ lives are placed in precarity, and the workers whose jobs are eliminated no longer participate in the economy. A form of social collapse is the expected long-term result.

Oberlin is not itself a government — the comparison to government austerity programs is an analogy. But there will be similar consequences to the “One Oberlin” program. Cutting spending will lead towards a decreased quality of service and education. Consequently, fewer and fewer students will look at Oberlin as an appealing or interesting application choice, and cyclically, the school will continue to lose enrollment and then have to find new ways to cut.

It is important, then, to challenge the logic of austerity measures. Even President Ambar seems willing now to concede that Oberlin cannot “cut its way to excellence” — sometimes, in fact, institutions must spend money, and accrue a deficit, to make money, and benefit society. The school and concerned students must think of different ways to advance the College into the future, and must not imperil its community stakeholders by thinking short-sightedly.

Even when the stakes are not so drastic as the loss of 108 good jobs, financial strain induces widespread moral anxiety. Whether truly unavoidable or artificial, it brings cold economic calculus into deeply emotional conflicts, prompting uncomfortable visions of the past and future. It is also a time when an institution must put its cards on the table, stating its priorities and measuring its rhetoric against its actions.

The administration, for all its appeals to universal fiscal reality, has also used its public defense of the UAW firings to tell a specific story about Oberlin, its history, and its values. President Ambar’s letter announcing the outsourcings on Tuesday, her address on the matter to the general faculty on Wednesday, and VP Vazquez-Skillings’ presentation to the workers that morning all used the same rhetoric: “excellence” must be preserved, and crises of enrollment and structure must be addressed. The interim Student Senate has opted to meet this language of institutional priorities and values on its own terms, arguing that rather Oberlin’s “historical commitment to social justice” and “conscience,” now threatened by an injustice of such proportions, is its foremost value.

This may be an effective rhetorical strategy. But as our community navigates the great moral conflict before us, we must question whether this conflict can be contained within a dispute over Oberlin’s institutional values. How seriously can we, as activists, speak of the “commitment to social justice” of an institution that still sends many graduates to key roles in the financial sector and the soft-power arms of the American empire?

The intent of these objections is not (merely) cynicism. It is not to suggest that the longstanding struggle to define Oberlin’s history and thence its future is not in its own way a noble one. It is certainly not to dissuade or gate-keep the great coalition that has emerged from our community to fight for the same goal, whatever their motivation. It is merely to remind us that this struggle runs deeper than one institution and its fickle public image. The plight of these 108 workers is the plight of labor everywhere, and the plight of humanity.

This spring, the Oberlin Student Co-op Association (OSCA) will be negotiating with Oberlin College senior administrators as the College implements the AAPR’s recommendation to “eliminate [OSCA’s] $1.9 million annual negative impact on Oberlin’s budget.” OSCA will enter these negotiations at a disadvantage, lacking the results of a study designed by Membership Secretary Bhairavi Mehra and Prof. John Petersen (OC ‘88) that multiple Oberlin administrators repeatedly supported before other administrators either firmly impeded or neglected their commitments to support.

This study would have surveyed a random sample of Oberlin alumni and generated data about OSCA’s educational value, compared to other non-academic experiences at Oberlin, such as dining in Campus Dining Services (CDS) or living in the various dorms and themed housing maintained by Residential Education (ResEd). It was designed in June of 2019 and sent to OC administrators for feedback in the first three weeks of July. During this consultation period, Mehra and Petersen made moderate amendments to the survey, though it didn’t undergo dramatic changes.

Then, the day prior to its “release date,” then-interim vice president for development and alumni affairs Rachel Smith Silver stopped the survey in order to review it — blindsiding the study’s designers, who only found out days later when Mehra noticed that zero responses had been registered. Thus began a period of indefinite “stalling,” said Mehra, bringing us to the present moment, when “nothing [has come] to fruition” and the survey has still not been sent out.

This project, and sequence of events, was not divulged to the Oberlin community until a public forum held in December 2019 by OSCA. At the forum, all-OSCA staff explained that they had committed to reducing OSCA’s negative impact on OC’s finances in their negotiations. They recapitulated AAPR’s report from last May, titled “One Oberlin,” which showed that OC loses out on $1.9 million in revenue due to students living and dining in co-ops. However, as Teagan Webb, then liaison between OC and OSCA explained in the forum, AAPR only assessed OSCA’s impact on OC’s bottom line — its financial value — and failed to account for OSCA’s educational value.

“Students in OSCA learn a lot of business skills,” said Mehra, in an interview with The Spectre. “Treasurers learn budgeting skills, [and] DLECs learn communication, discussion, organization. Staff members basically run a nonprofit.” Mehra pointed out “One Oberlin” recommends the implementation of a business concentration, approved by faculty last week, “to combine core business management and financial skills with [a] liberal arts major or ‘conservatory specialization’”: however, the report does not consider that OSCA is an existing organization where students acquire these precise skills.

Following the report’s release in May 2019, Mehra and Petersen commenced designing the study, motivated by Mehra’s “conviction that, in order to cut money from an organisation, one should first evaluate said organisation.”

Mehra received a fellowship from EnviroAlums, an Affiliate Group of the Alumni Association, and began working with Prof. Petersen in her capacity as an independent student researcher, not through the resources afforded by her MemSec position. The study would consist in a voluntary survey of Oberlin alumni, and Mehra and Petersen received assurances from the Alumni Association’s former President, Danielle Young, that her organization supported their initiative and would email the survey to alumni. Mehra and Petersen also applied for, and received, an exemption from the Institutional Review Board, which oversees scientific studies involving human subjects — this meant that they were able to proceed.

This survey was initially designed to quantify the educational value of OSCA, but after further consideration and consultation with various administrators, Mehra and Petersen decided to expand its scope. They redesigned the survey to be comparative in nature, evaluating experiences with OSCA along with experiences in dorms run by Residential Education (ResEd), in theme housing, the experiences of Residential Advisors (RAs), and experiences on Campus Dining Services meal plans (CDS). “In the context of Oberlin, ResEd, and CDS,” said Mehra, the survey would “give more of a ground for our data.”

Mehra and Petersen worked on designing the survey during the month of June 2019, after which point, they initiated a three-week-long consultation process, which lasted the majority of July. Although Mehra said they “tried [their] best to have the questions not just deal with things that OSCA is good at,” she acknowledged that neither she nor Prof. Petersen had spent significant time living in ResEd or dining in CDS. Because of this, they felt that they lacked knowledge about the potential educational benefits of CDS or ResEd experiences — hence, the need to consult.

They then solicited feedback from college administrators in every relevant area: from vice president for finance and administration Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings, associate dean of students Dana Hamdan, and senior administrators in CDS and ResEd. “As much as we want this survey to be like ‘OSCA is great,’ we also wanted to have data that was honest.” In addition, they received input from OC alumni, including OSCA and non-OSCA alumni.

Mehra characterized the feedback they received as both supportive and constructive. Ms. Vazquez-Skillings, in particular, “pushed us to have it be fully comparative,” said Mehra, rather than narrowly focused on OSCA. Some feedback was solely supportive, as “a lot of people didn’t give us a lot of concerns, a lot of people thought it was solid.” The survey did undergo changes — questions that may have alarmed alumni, such as perceived implications of existential threats to OSCA, and other objectionable questions, were “removed or radically reconsidered.” Generally, because “alumni data [are] spread out across departments” at Oberlin, administrators don’t have easy access to much data. Conducting this study, they were told time and time again, would be a gift to administrators.

Mehra and Petersen also requested feedback from College vice president and dean of students Meredith Raimondo. At the time, Raimondo was busy navigating the fallout of the Gibson’s verdict, said Mehra, so “understandably” did not respond to their request.

After applying tweaks to the survey, Mehra and Petersen sent the final survey to Danielle Young for one final round of consultation with the Alumni Leadership Council, the “governing body of the Oberlin Alumni Association, empowered to undertake and regulate any action of or on behalf of the Association.”

Of the 19 responses that Mehra says they received from the Alumni Council, “all of them were really excited about the survey.” One member pointed out that the survey’s length could discourage participation, and suggested incentivizing completing it. This drove Ms. Young to create a raffle, available to survey respondents, for Oberlin “swag” (the likes of t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) In addition to the moral support that Mehra and Petersen received from the Council and from Young, and the financial support that Mehra received from EnviroAlums, the Alumni Association was prepared to invest in swag to support the initiative.

Then, the survey wasn’t sent out.

“It was supposed to be sent out on Monday [July 29th], and when Tuesday rolled around ... we didn't seem to have any responses,” said Mehra. “So I waited another day, got nothing, and I emailed Prof. Petersen,” alerting him to the conspicuous lack of responses.

When Prof. Petersen got in touch with the Alumni Association, he learned that Rachel Smith Silver had intervened, according to Mehra. Because the President of the Alumni Association — then Danielle Young — answers to the vice president for development and alumni affairs, Smith Silver was able to block the Alumni Association from emailing the survey until it passed her personal review.

According to Mehra, Prof. Petersen began attempting in earnest to meet with Ms. Smith Silver. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to secure a meeting, Petersen and Smith Silver finally met in early August. “From what I understand, the meeting did not go well,” said Mehra.

Ms. Smith Silver gave two reasons for quashing the survey. Her first cited precedent: the Alumni Association only surveys alumni every four years, and not at other times. To Mehra, this was not a sufficient reason: the “One Oberlin” report specifically recommended that “the College and OSCA [assess] the learning outcomes from different residential experiences” (“One Oberlin,” p. 29). This recommendation placed a clear mandate on OSCA to generate precisely the kind of data which the survey would have produced.

Additionally, the survey was only going to be sent out to a random sample of one thousand alumni — a compromise to Mehra and Petersen’s original intention, to send it to everybody they could. The Alumni Association’s every-four-years surveys are comprehensive surveys of the alumni network: in 2013, 21,000 alumni were sent surveys, everybody “for whom [the Alumni Association] had active email addresses.”

Second, Ms. Smith Silver believed that it was a bad idea to survey alumni during such a sensitive time, with respect to the then-recent decision in the Gibson’s lawsuit and the spate of bad press that Oberlin received. According to Mehra, Danielle Young believed that the opposite was true: the survey was “a way to positively engage” alumni, encouraging them to reflect on the skills and educational experiences they acquired from their time at Oberlin.

Mehra and Petersen had reached an impasse. Looking for a path forward, they got in contact with Dean Raimondo, and set up a meeting with her.

This first meeting went well for Mehra and Petersen: according to Mehra, Raimondo “seemed really enthusiastic about the survey and offered her resources into looking into what could be done.” Because Raimondo was unable to provide feedback over the summer, Mehra and Petersen sent her the survey. “She was going to send us a document with her feedback — a ‘brainstorming’ doc” where the three of them would work out alternative strategies. “A few weeks later, we hadn’t really heard back,” said Mehra.

“We [continued] contacting her and ... got late responses, or responses saying, like, ‘oh, I haven’t talked with Rachel yet, or I need to touch base with this person,’” said Mehra. “After a few more email exchanges,” and one additional meeting, “it seemed that ... [Raimondo] was under the impression that [they] didn’t need to meet anymore. She was basically like ‘there’s nothing that I can do for you’” (Ed. note: Dean Raimondo did not respond to The Spectre’s request for comment).

“Throughout this process, Prof. Petersen and I were open to adding or removing a couple questions — we just really wanted this survey to go out,” said Mehra. It was crucial for the survey to be sent out using the Alumni Association’s mailing list, and not the OSCA alumni mailing list — as Mehra explained, they did not want their pool of respondents to be skewed toward OSCA alumni, which would misrepresent the diverse types of student experiences at Oberlin.

“Even though we went through this process,” designing the survey, consulting, redesigning, and coordinating with the Alumni Association and the IRB, “it just seems that ... certain players didn’t want this data to exist,” said Mehra.

Prof. Petersen echoed this sentiment at December’s forum. OSCA’s minutes quote him saying “I am so disappointed that, for political reasons, that [the sending out of the survey] was stopped. I conclude they didn’t want us to collect the [data] because it would hurt their position” — that OSCA is a liability, not a benefit, to Oberlin.

Since the forum, Rachel Silver Smith has left her interim position, and Michael Grzesiak has been named the College’s new vice president of development and alumni affairs. As such, Mr. Grzesiak now has the authority to permit, or not to permit, the Alumni Association to conduct the survey. (Ed. note: after initially agreeing to an interview, Mr. Grzesiak has not responded to multiple requests for comment. The Spectre invites both Ms. Raimondo and Mr. Grzesiak to confirm or dispute its reporting.)

Following December’s public forum, the student group Oberlin Beyond Austerity began circulating a petition titled “Demands for Increased Transparency and Accountability in the One Oberlin Implementation.” First among its demands: “Collaborate with OSCA to conduct the survey ... additionally, incorporate this data into the model selection process.”

“One of the things that’s most disheartening to me in this whole process ... is that the [project] was endeavoring to do what Oberlin supposedly asks us to do: think critically about what we’re doing and where we are,” said Mehra. Oberlin College’s mission statement reads “Oberlin aims to prepare graduates with the knowledge, skills, and perspectives essential to confront complex issues and to create change and value in the world.”

“This endeavor was funded by a group of alumni, and was an independent student project,” said Mehra. “And the institution wasn’t supportive.”

On Thursday, February 6th, between twenty and thirty students flocked to a room in Wilder Student Union to call voters on behalf of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. The “Bernie phone bank” event, planned and organized only days prior, brought out students from all levels of political involvement, from committed members of OYDSA and OC Democrats, to students who, up until now, had never been involved in a political campaign before.

“I thought only, like, six people would show up,” joked organizer and College fourth-year Clio Schwartz, addressing the packed room. Schwartz provided call scripts, helped volunteers troubleshoot occasional problems with the “Bernie Dialer,” a web-based calling application, and brought coffee and paper cups donated by Slow Train Café.

“I organized the phone bank after canvassing in Medina last weekend,” said Schwartz, in an email to The Spectre. “It made me realize just how important every single interaction with a potential voter is.” Seeing that many of their peers are Sanders supporters, but didn’t “have the momentum to volunteer,” Schwartz decided to organize the phone bank on campus.

Nick Politi, a fourth-year double-degree student, skipped a composition department forum to participate in the phone bank. In an interview with The Spectre, he described a “sharp contrast” between the competitive, “careerist” environment in the Conservatory and the “camaraderie” that ran through the phone bank event. “My department has pushed me into my individual career and I feel so selfish ... doing something to empower and advocate for people is like a breath of fresh air for me.”

Emma Bredthauer, a fourth-year student in the College, showed up to support Sanders’ campaign and his call for a universal single-payer healthcare system, Medicare for All. “I have a chronic illness, and it's really disgusting that other people who are dealing with chronic illnesses cannot get the care that they need in this country. The fact that [Sanders] has been consistent, and hasn't wavered, is huge.” (Medicare for Whomst?)

Both Bredthauer and Politi describe themselves as newcomers to electoral campaigning. “I really like how this is a people-powered movement, and I think that that was really evident [on Thursday],” said Bredthauer. “We're not like seasoned campaign volunteers, but we're doing this because we really believe in it.” Politi says he “deserted politics” after his first semester at Oberlin, when Donald Trump won the presidential election. Asked why he came back, he cited feeling “really empowered by a candidate for the first time in my life.” When Bernie announced his 2020 run, Politi says, “it was like he was coming back for us.”